Top Spotify Lawyer: Attracting Pirates is in Our DNA

Spotify is not only one of the world’s most popular music services, it’s also one that’s proven particularly popular with both current and former pirates. From a report on TorrentFreak: Today Spotify is indeed huge. The service has an estimated 100 million users, many of them taking advantage of its ad-supported free tier. This is the gateway for many subscribers, including millions of former and even current pirates who augment their sharing with the desirable service. Now, in a new interview with The Journal on Sports and Entertainment Law, General Counsel of Spotify Horacio Gutierrez reveals just how deeply this philosophy runs in the company. It’s absolutely fundamental to its being, he explains. “One of the things that inspired the creation of Spotify and is part of the DNA of the company from the day it launched (and remember the service was launched for the first time around 8 years ago) was addressing one of the biggest questions that everyone in the music industry had at the time — how would one tackle and combat online piracy in music?” Gutierrez says. “Spotify was determined from the very beginning to provide a fully licensed, legal alternative for online music consumption that people would prefer over piracy.” […] Of course, hardcore pirates aren’t always easily encouraged to part with their cash, so Spotify needed an equivalent to the no-cost approach of many torrent sites. That is still being achieved today via its ad-supported entry level, Gutierrez says.